It is easy to imagine the virtuous pride with which the civil engineer, Jasper O’Farrell, set about the laying out of the town of San Francisco in 1846. Here was the ideal site for a city—a peninsula lying like a great thumb on the hand of the mainland, between the Pacific Ocean and a deep, land-locked bay, an area romantically configured of hills and valleys, with picturesque mountain and water views, the setting sun in the west and Mount Diablo a sentinel in the east; to the northward, the sea channel of the Golden Gate overhung by the foot-hills of Tamalpais. There was still chance to amend and improve the old town site of Yerba Buena, the little Spanish settlement by the cove in the harbor, whose straight, narrow streets had been artlessly ruled by Francisco de Haro, alcalde of the Mission Dolores. He had marked out upon the ground, northerly, La Calle de la Fundacion and the adjacent squares necessary for the little port of entry in 1835. Four years later, when Governor Alvarado directed a new survey of the place, Jean Vioget extended the original lines with mathematical precision to the hills surrounding the valley; and it would have been possible to correct that artistic blunder of the simple-minded alcalde. But Jasper O’Farrell had seen military service with General Sutter; his ways were stern and severe, his esthetic impulses, if he had any, were heroically subdued. Market Street, indeed, he permitted to run obliquely, though it went straight as a bullet towards the Twin Peaks. The rest of the city he made one great checkerboard, in defiance of its natural topography. As one might constrict the wayward fancies of a gipsy maiden to the cold, tight-laced ethics of a puritanical creed, so O’Farrell bound the city that was to be for ever to a gridiron of right-angled streets and blocks of parallelograms. He knew no compromise. His streets took their straight and narrow way, up hill and down dale, without regard to grade or expense. Unswerving was their rectitude. Their angles were exactly ninety degrees of his compass, north and south, east and west. Where might have been entrancingly beautiful terraces, rising avenue above avenue to the heights, preserving the master-view of the continent, now the streets, committed to his plan, are hacked out of the earth and rock, precipitous, inaccessible, grotesque. So sprawls the fey, leaden-colored town over its dozen hills, its roads mounting to the sky or diving to the sea.